Ayah Abo-Basha

Bio/Description

 

Ayah Abo Basha

Ayah Abo-Basha received an MA in anthropology from the American University in Cairo and a BA in anthropology with honors from Washington University in St. Louis. She was awarded a post-MA Mellon fellowship by the Humanities and Social Sciences Lab at the American University in Cairo and spent two months as a visiting fellow at the University of Witwatersrand’s City Institute. Ayah is interested in the enmeshments of individuals and collectives within urban landscapes, and the experiments in caregiving and homemaking amidst conditions of precarity produced and co-produced by the carceral state. Her research traces how the presence of prisons in people’s relationships reconfigures sociality in ways that involve  neoliberal adjustment programs, moralizing discourses around security, and a structure of feeling defined by political depression following a transnational moment of uprisings. Ayah’s thinking and writing has moved between different “post” cities of the Global South (post- Oslo, post-apartheid, post-colonial), and extends from previous research on the genealogy of individual and collective hunger-strikes in Israel-Palestine.